by Walter Chaw There's something decidedly uncinematic about the films of Lucio Fulci (excepting Don't Torture a Duckling and Four of the Apocalypse, which actually sort of rock). If not for his fascination with gore effects and his propensity for casting irritating children in irritating children parts, it'd be hard to find anything to separate his work from the grindhouse ghetto of, say, Jess Franco. As it is, the stilted claims at auteurism (he's known as the master of eye violence, mainly for a few juicy bits from The Beyond and Zombie) do more, perhaps, to relegate his work to a sort of camp gulag: the Siberia of legitimate cinema, where adolescent tools congregate for midnight showings armed with irony and a crippling baggage of disdain and contempt. I liked "Mystery Science Theater 3000" and believed that I liked it because I was sophisticated; in time, you realize that you like it because you're an officious prick who sort of gets off on mocking movies. I think a lot of people would argue that this is the role of the film critic, but I'd offer that a critic--a good one--loves film so much that he or she is offended when a movie is terrible. There's no real joy in defiling altars, particularly when they're your own.

by Bryant Frazer The title sounds awkward in a not-ironic way and the 1987 copyright date suggests a cheap direct-to-video cheesefest. But director Michael Fischa is swinging for the B-movie fences from the very first shot--a Steadicam number that pans across its view of Sunset Boulevard, animated lightning bolts flashing over the Hollywood Hills, before craning down into the parking lot in front of the Starbody Health Spa. Dreamy, Tangerine Dream-esque synths well up on the soundtrack. Upon touchdown, the Steadicam glides forward towards the building as another lightning strike knocks out most of the figures on the whimsically-lettered neon sign up front, so that only eight letters remain lit: DEATH SPA.

by Bill Chambers A slasher movie in spirit, Greydon Clark's Without Warning sure opens like one, in that some cannon fodder is swiftly dispatched to establish the bogeyman and the threat he represents. But instead of the typical frisky coeds or vacationing couple, the first victims are a father (Cameron Mitchell) and his adult son (Darby Hinton) on a hunting trip, and their dialogue is freighted with an impressive amount of history and subtext. The son is rudely awakened at the crack of dawn by his angry father; he proceeds to criticize the taste of the local water, which the father stubbornly hears as girlish griping rather than the anvil it actually is. Though they're archetypal opposites (the Great Santini and his sensitive offspring), the son does try to call a truce of sorts and is soundly, sadly rebuffed. The father's macho anti-intellectualism--the boy brought books on a hunting trip!--makes theirs an unbridgeable generation gap, and there's an unsettling moment where he trains his rifle on his son, sniper-style, before thinking the better of it. Then suddenly the father is attacked by flesh-eating disks that burrow into his skin, and what can he do except cry out for his kid, who soon suffers the same tragic fate.

August 12, 2014

by Walter Chaw Appearing in 1989 at the very end of the blockbuster decade and on the cusp of a digital revolution, Steven Soderbergh's micro-budgeted sex, lies, and videotape heralded a doomed renaissance in independent film that would find it melded, ultimately and inseparably, with mainstream concerns. It posits that people only tell the truth when they're captured on celluloid--that when the video camera starts running, the assumption of roles begins. By the end of the '90s, precisely a decade later with American Beauty, there's another character with a video camera, but in that one, everything has turned: the lies are on film, and the truth is digital. (See also: Michael Almereyda's endlessly rewarding Hamlet (2000) and the still-incomparable The Blair Witch Project (1999).)

by Bryant Frazer Of all the lousy, Z-list horror films that flooded American multiplexes in the wake of the success of Friday the 13th, The Final Terror may have the most incongruously A-list IMDb profile page, which explains its failure to languish in well-deserved obscurity. It is exemplary of the 1980s horror boom as opportunistic folly--horror movies were being made by people who had no interest in making horror movies, simply because that's where the easy money was. Horror buffs know this, but still, how can any self-respecting 21st-century genre cultist resist the siren call of a little-known slasher starring Rachel Ward, Daryl Hannah, Mark Metcalf, Adrian Zmed, and Joe Pantoliano and directed by Andrew Davis?

July 29, 2014

Night Eyes**/**** Image B+ Sound B- Extras B+starring Sam Groom, Sara Botsford, Lisa Langlois, Scatman Crothersscreenplay by Charles Eglee, based on a screenplay by Lonon Smith and the novel The Rats by James Herbertdirected by Robert Clouse

by Bryant Frazer There's really only one thing you need to know about Deadly Eyes, and I'm going to tell you right here in the lede. Deadly Eyes is a film in which hordes of giant killer rats terrorizing downtown Toronto are played by dachshunds wearing rat costumes. That's it. A monster movie is only as good as its monster, and this monster is wiener dogs in drag. If you don't find that off-putting--perhaps you raised your eyebrows, gasped in delight, and leaned in a little closer to your computer screen upon reading those words--then it's quite possible Deadly Eyes is the terrible horror movie you've been waiting for.

by Bill Chambers As with most "origin" Tarzan films, Tarzan himself is an off-screen promise for the first third of Tarzan the Ape Man, though his famous yodel (which the studio maintains was artificially created) portends his appearance about ten minutes before he actually materializes. Likewise, as with most origin Tarzans, this one has become something of a viewing formality: The basics of Tarzan are pop-culture fundamentals passed down through the generations as if by osmosis, and so any film that aims to tell the story from scratch is bound to seem a little sluggish. It's remarkable, then, that Tarzan the Ape Man, in addition to exhibiting a surprising immunity to the ravages of time, is also mostly spared the contempt born of familiarity. Cutie-pie Maureen O'Sullivan essays the talkies' first Jane, who joins her father James's (C. Aubrey Smith) expedition in Africa and immediately casts a spell on dad's right-hand man, Harry Holt (Neil Hamilton). Once they begin their treacherous journey across the Mutia escarpment, beyond which allegedly lies an elephant graveyard that James and co. plan to raid for its ivory, Jane meets her true intended, the monosyllabic, acrobatic Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller). Though Tarzan more or less abducts Jane, their compatibility is such that she refutes her father's claim that Tarzan belongs to the jungle when she's reunited with the caravan. "Not now. He belongs to me," she pouts.

July 3, 2014

by Bryant Frazer Beware the toothless horror film--it's no fun being gummed to death. That's how you feel, more or less, by the climax of Final Exam, a low-budget Halloween knock-off crossed with a dopey frat-boy comedy. Written and directed by Jimmy Huston, who had made a series of southern-fried features for the drive-in circuit with North Carolina-based actor-producer Earl Owensby, Final Exam is a vintage programmer about a handful of students on a mostly-deserted college campus and a serial killer slicing his way through them, essentially at random.

July 2, 2014

by Vincent Suarez SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I was one of the few Caucasians who defied the tabloid pundits and ventured into a New York City theatre to see Do the Right Thing in the summer of 1989. Seated beside me were not rioters, but a tiny African-American child very much like the sidewalk artist appearing both in the film and on its posters. Her mother and I got a kick out of her enthusiastic dancing to the strains of the Public Enemy tune that drives the credit sequence, and she spent the next two hours bobbing in her seat, softly singing "fight the power" whenever Radio Raheem's box would blare its anthem.

by Walter Chaw As easy as it is to dismiss Sylvester Stallone as your everyday, run-of-the-mill swinging dick, another in the pantheon of Eighties-into-Nineties box-office meatsticks assembled anew by Sly in his Expendables franchise, it becomes clear in retrospect that Stallone has his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist in his most personal projects, if not always in his contract jobs. Although an obvious and atrocious failure whose Stallone-authored screenplay, the end-product of a series of rewrites Stallone took it upon himself to inflict on Beverly Hills Cop, Cobra manages still to deliver a few smart genre mash-up moments, a few topical reflections of late-'80s crime-wave paranoia. Sandwiched in there right between his second and third Rambo films and fourth and fifth Rockys, Cobra is the kind of vanity piece that appears now and again in Stallone's repertoire to distract attention away from all the other stuff that only looks like a vanity project. Stallone is sneaky in a very particular way. As a sociologist, intentional or not, he is absolutely brilliant, and just on the strength of his Rocky and Rambo pictures, he's managed as good a diary of the fears and hopes of the last twenty years as any other body of work from any other single artist. He's the Bruce Springsteen of popular cinema. Bruce produced a lot of crap, too.

by Bryant Frazer Ah, summer camp. Softball games, capture the flag, nightswimming, and life-changing boating accidents. Not to mention killer bees, child molesters, maniacs in the shower, and one kid with a whole lot of baggage, if you know what I mean. Sleepaway Camp is a slasher movie, and it depicts lakeside Camp Arawak as a pressure-cooker of hormones and teenage flop sweat. Into this fetid milieu step Ricky and Angela, teenaged cousins united by tragedy: a boating accident that killed Angela's parents and sibling some years earlier. Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten) might be a little awkward, but he just wants to fit in; Angela (Felissa Rose), meanwhile, seems downright disturbed, spending much of her time dead silent, staring down her fellow campers with a mournful, almost accusatory glare. Before long, some of those campers start dropping dead as surely as the flies that coat the glue strips dangling in Arawak's kitchen. There's a soup incident, a shower incident, and an incident involving a toilet stall and angry bees. There's a bit of business with a curling iron that's probably inappropriate in a movie starring underage actors. The slasher's hands appear on screen, but do they belong to unhappy Angela? Overprotective Ricky? Or someone else entirely?

by Bryant Frazer Consider the pig. Pork is damned near a gourmet food these days. Celebrity chefs will serve you layers of pork belly wrapped around potatoes, figs, even pineapple. They'll dip bacon in chocolate, infuse it in vodka, or drape it across an ice-cream sundae, resplendent in its brown glory. Your local organic market probably sells artisanal bacon cured with dark, fine-grained muscovado imported from Mauritius and flavoured with angel farts and faerie dust. The recent cinema has also celebrated the pig, via two excellent Babe movies and a decent adaptation of Charlotte's Web. It wasn't always that way, though. No less an authority than God Himself went Old Testament on pork back in the day, and it took the famous and completely disingenuous "Pork: The Other White Meat" campaign to rehabilitate swine for the U.S. market. What I mean to say is that the 1982 horror movie Evilspeak, in which a trio of crazed, Satan-possessed porkers burst into a bathroom and disembowel a nude woman taking a shower, couldn't have done the humble pig's reputation any favours.

by Bill Chambers It's possible that the monster success of "Crocodile" Dundee--a low-budget Australian import starring the international spokesman for Foster's Lager's and Australian tourism--seems like temporary mass hysteria these days. In America, the film was the second-biggest release of 1986 (after Top Gun), earning more than the combined grosses of eventual perennials Aliens and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Paul Hogan even won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical. (The screenplay, co-written by Hogan, was, yes, nominated for an Oscar; Hannah and Her Sisters claimed the prize.) But in the years since, the term "Crocodile Dundee" has become derogatory shorthand for the outdoorsy Australian, and the notoriously generous IMDb voters currently have the movie at a Grinchy 6.5/10. It's a film that has been curiously immune to '80s/childhood nostalgia, as the tardy, Razzie-nominated second sequel either confirmed or guaranteed.

by Bill Chambers The 1985 remake of Brewster's Millions is a failed high-concept fable not for its dearth of laughs (which is disappointing, what with Richard Pryor and John Candy headlining) or its overfamiliarity (it will remind you of not only Brewster's Millions past, but also every underdog comedy ever made), but because you wouldn't really want to wear the shoes of the eponymous Monty Brewster, a millionaire whose inheritance is shackled by so many caveats as to deny Monty--when we know him, anyway--a sense of wish-fulfillment.

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Taylor Hackford's Raging Bull, the episodic pigskin melodrama Everybody's All-American boasts a trio of fantastic performances at the service of a picture that's all sturm and no drang, a weightless thing packed to the rafters with heaving moments over the course of a twenty-five year span that somehow fail to add up to an affecting whole. It comes at the tail end of the prolific Dennis Quaid's most prolific era, rounding up unqualified successes like The Big Easy and Innerspace (and unqualified miscues like D.O.A.) and serving as a handy career summary for Hackford, who hit it big with the revered cheese classic An Officer and a Gentleman, which he's been dutifully remaking in one form or another ever since. Success is an unforgiving mistress--so is lack of range and imagination.